This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

Springtime’s home address is Bay St. Louis
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. — If springtime has an address, it's the corner of Beach and Main in Bay St. Louis.
I loiter on a sidewalk stenciled with blue sailboats, wondering why it's been so long si nee I've visited this fine place. Has it been a year?
Even the smell of it makes me feel good. It’s a combination smell of brackish water, frying shrimp and sweet* magnolias ready to pop open.
Most years, I keep an appointment with the world’s most impressive azaleas. They grow like weeds down here, big as barns and without any real effort on the gardener's part. I have been known to drive hundreds of miles just to catch the high tide of fuchsia.
Mississippi Gulf Coast azaleas are not
doled out in parsimonious little bushes the way they are elsewhere. The azaleas here are towering walls, planted anywhere and everywhere, in the yards of hubcap shops and mansions, churches and restaurants, shotgun shacks and VFW posts. These are democratic azaleas.
There’s plenty of spring left to enjoy in this town where nobody hurries or wears pantyhose or neckties.
In front of me the bay shimmers, a ditch full of diamonds. I like to si tat a joint called Dock of the Bay and watch the frequent trains crossing the bay bridge, the dock shakes a bit when the trains pass.
On my right is the shop of an artist who paints animals, mostly cats, on cocks. They look so real you want to pet them. There are about 60 artists living and working in Bay St. Louis, population 8,000. So the Cat Rock Lady is in good company.
Behind me is a live oak strung with Spanish moss. This is heaven.
At the old Bay St. Louis depot, they once made a movie from a Tennessee Williams play. “This Property Is Condemned” starred Natalie Wood and Robert Redford,
who probably didn't stand out much at all in a town where most of the population looks beautiful, or at least bohemian.
I love the musty shops in this old part of town: 1 can rummage through some of them for hours, knowing that the laid-back owners don’t mind when finally I make my way to the cash register to spend only $1 on a cracked souvenir cup from New Orleans.
Today, a store specializing in old books and vintage lamps gets most of my attention. I get blissfully lost in a basket stacked high with-old piano sheet music, every-, thing from “Deep Purple” to “Na Lei 0 Hawaii: Song of the Island.”
The people that I ask all say the casinos haven't changed Bay St. Louis much. I constantly worry that they will.
But the old part of town seems remarkably the same, full of idlers like me who think hitting the jackpot means finding “As Time Goes By” in a stack of used sheet music.
Rheta Crimsley Johnson is a columnist j for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
RHETA
GRIMSLEY
JOHNSON